


dawn through broken windows

by TrashcanWithSprinkles



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Contemplative, Cuddles, Happy Ending, Hugs, M/M, What is Pacing, a lot of ppl are there they're just entirely background characters, also uh, and dream's the captain of the ship, basically whoever's on the dream smp plus philza, everyone who wasn't in smp earth is just instantly a citizen of the antarctic empire, fugitives??, god i have no idea what this is, i think that's it yeah that's the fic, it's one big long conversation scene and then some other stuff at the end, melancholic, no beta we die like men, ok so basically techno gets on a fugitive ship and sails with them to safe land, pirates? i think?, soft, takes place in the smp earth world but like without the plot of smp earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27246463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrashcanWithSprinkles/pseuds/TrashcanWithSprinkles
Summary: In which Techno ends up on a fugitive ship, and the Captain takes a liking to him.
Relationships: Clay | Dream/Dave | Technoblade
Comments: 52
Kudos: 935





	dawn through broken windows

**Author's Note:**

> you know the jig, hope you enjoy this!
> 
> Now available in Russian!  
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/28175382  
> Translated by the lovely Ugly_Sockoos

Technoblade likes the crow's nest. 

In a ship full of people who are very familiar with each other, it's the quietest spot to go hide in during the days. And during the nights, the harsh cold winds are at its loudest up there, usually loud enough to drown out everything else that torments him in the silence of sleeping hours. 

It's not a spot where he can get blindsided from, nor have anyone sneak up on him. Getting all the way up there takes quite the arm strength, something not everyone in the ship possesses. At least not enough to justify going all the way up just to bother him.

In short, he can be as alone as possible while still pulling his weight as a passenger on this ship.

Albeit a rather unwilling and sudden one.

He wasn't expecting to get caught in the crossfire of a raid on the port, let's just leave it at that. 

There  _ are _ people on this ship that insist on interrupting his solitude, however. 

There's the kid he accidentally rescued from the onslaught, one of the two – the rascal apparently finds it funny to go up there and hold an entirely one-sided conversation that's always louder than it should be before jumping off in cackles at the sight of his annoyed expression. There's the musician who jokingly serenades him from down on the deck every once in a while but never actually takes the climb all the way up to him. The man with the white goggles clambers up on occasion, when fleeing the lunatic with the headband.

And then there's the captain.

Dream, as they call him, is a man of many mysteries. Half the ship's crew has never seen his face, even fewer of them know where he came from. If one were to tell Technoblade that Dream is the ship's captain because he's the most skilled out of them all, he would believe it without question.

None of that really mattered to him, to be entirely honest.

All he knows is Dream has a tendency to claw up to the crow's nest when  _ he's _ up there and invade his loneliness like he knows not of ambient cues.

To be fair, neither does Techno, but that's not the point.

He watches as the man sits on the edge of the basket, legs dangling over the drop down, and holds in – not for the first time – the petty contrarian urge to push him off.

Techno tells himself he's supposed to be  _ grateful _ they let him flee port on their ship, and a  _ good samaritan  _ for 'going out of his way' to save two of their youngest crewmates from the chaos.

He sighs.

The alternative of staying behind and fighting through steel and fire as the bandits ransack the town doesn't sound too appealing, if he stops to think about it.

It's just more familiar than… whatever this 'camaraderie' is supposed to be. 

"Had a long night?" Dream asks.

Dream always asks.

He takes a look at his exhausted and long-dead eyes from behind his white mocking mask and asks if he's tired, as if he doesn't know damn well Technoblade's been sitting awake up in the crow's nest for the entire night – since the moment he escaped yesterday's dinner, to the sunrise with which Dream arrived to what’s unofficially been 'his spot' for the past two weeks. 

Technoblade doesn't know why he asks, if he expects a different answer every time, something other than the unenthusiastic:

"Yep."

...he always croaks out back, voice as dry from disuse as it was when he first stepped onto the deck.

"Same old," Dream sighs, quickly rubbing his hands together to combat the cold of dawn.

Technoblade returns his gaze to the blue horizon and wraps his winter coat snugly around himself.

Dream turns to him, and there's blessed silence for another beat.

"D'you think there's room for one more in there?" he asks, somewhere between sheepish and mischievous, having resorted to rubbing warmth into his arms.

Technoblade doesn't let himself roll his eyes, keeping his attention on the ocean. "If you sat like a normal human being, then perhaps," he muses, his voice betraying nothing.

Conversation comes easy with Dream, he admits. The man doesn't expect him to abide by societal norms, doesn't insist he be kind on his every waking our, doesn't even demand verbal replies to his questions and comments. Technoblade finds himself being less curt and cutting towards him than he tends to be with others, out of pure relief of the simple fact he  _ could not _ if he felt like it.

Dream gets down from the edge of the basket and takes a seat directly next to him, welcoming himself into the warmth of Technoblade's coat as he drapes it to cover them both. Dream scoots until he's practically pressed to his hip, and then leans on him, the both of them warmed by the thick coat.

He stays still like it's his final position, like he's not going to make any changes, and Techno wonders why he does things like this.

Why he sits so close to him, when the coat is certainly big enough to allow some wiggle room and he knows Dream knows this. Why he rests his head on his shoulder as if he couldn't help it.

Why he always stands close. Why his mask always lingers in his direction. 

Techno doesn't know. He doesn't know if he's the odd one out, the stranger in the room; or if Dream's just  _ like this  _ with everyone else. He hasn't been paying nearly enough attention when it matters.

He doesn't like it, because he does. 

And he shouldn't. 

It's not the path he threw himself into when there was no other way out. It's not part of the things he resigned himself to having when he had to abandon all else. It's some semblance of affection that he'd call names if he knew them by heart, if he's allowed to be presumptuous and probably wrong. It's the life of a normal man he already exchanged for survival.

His mind and body have become strong, yet his heart's grown weak – too weak to let anything so much as phase it.

So he locks it securely behind key, and tosses it somewhere to lose it if he can.

Unluckily for him, all empty things float and wash up on shores, and it seems his heart was no exception. It was dragged along with him onto this ship, away from port. And now he doesn't know what to do with it.

Peace, he's found, is a terrible enabler.

"Are you tired?" Dream asks after what feels like several minutes of relative silence. The ship is still asleep, and Technoblade sighs.

He is.

He is so very tired.

He is tired of so many things – of things Dream does and doesn't know. Yet he doesn't know where that line starts. A story seems to have been born around him over the years, and Dream seems to have heard some of it. The many things people say he's done. The many things people say he's been called.

He doesn't know, and he's not sure he cares either way.

He’s just tired.

But all he gets out is a quiet, “kind of,” that isn’t muttered in the man’s direction and is instead whispered out into the sea. As if he’s trying to test the waters, to see how the gods above would react to their outcast expressing discontent with a situation he got himself into.

“You didn’t sleep.” It’s not a question.

“One day I’ll sleep enough,” he simply says. ‘Forever,’ he refrains from adding.

“Won’t we all,” is Dream’s muttered, small reply.

It catches him slightly off guard, so much so that he spares the man at his side a glance.

But Dream’s just looking out into the ocean, and so he continues doing the same.

The sun rises from the wrong direction, and they stare in silence as the wind rustles their hair and the light hits their faces – hits Dream’s mask, in his case.

“I thought we were headed northwest,” Techno hums, unfaced, as he looks out to the sun peeking through the waters at two o’clock. They’re going northeast.

It takes Dream a beat of calm silence to reply. “I’ll tell Bad to change course after breakfast,” he mumbles, unbothered, sleepy.

“Long night?” he asks, bored, a callback to Dream’s constant question. The man sure slumps on him as though he caught no rest, either.

“What  _ is _ a long night, in your opinion?” Dream asks instead.

Technoblade wonders how many times he’s done this, asking things just for the sake of having a conversation.   
Even if said conversation leads them nowhere, and is filled with far too many pauses in between you might as well think he just wants to have someone talking to drown out something else.

He can commiserate on that, at least.

“My opinion or my experience?” he half-corrects, watching the sun break through the mist of the morning.

“Words are made up; your experience,” Dream almost pouts.

A long night is a dark road he sees no end nor beginning to, yet he continues to wander it anyway. Hands clammy from the cold closed tightly around his sword’s handle, boots kicking up dust and rocks as he marches on through the shadows.

A long night is another night without a place to settle down. No tent, no campfire, no inns, no company.

They say there’s no rest for the wicked, anyway.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles instead. “Not sure I’ve experienced a short night before.” 

A long night is everything he’s come to know and hate.   
And when you’re so alone, that constitutes mostly himself.

“Ever?” Dream’s tone is curious yet quiet, private.

“Why do you ask?” he turns to the mocking mask, brows furrowed in confusion, a question he’s been wanting to get out since the second the man asked for his name.

“Can’t I?” the man shrugs, looking up at him from the same spot as before. The sunlight hits his mask in the right angle to make Techno squint from the brightness. There’s a beat of silence, and he tilts his head slightly to spare his eyes. He almost thanks him. “You have the eyes of a man who’s killed his sleep paralysis demon and taken its place.”

“That’s an awfully elaborate description for what people usually say are just dead-fish eyes,” Techno hums, unsure where this conversation is supposed to be going by now.

“Not dead, no,” Dream shakes his head slightly, and he says it with such simple certainty that he might as well be spelling facts. “Imprisoned, maybe. Thoroughly defeated,” at that, Techno scoffs. “Not physically; emotionally,” Dream quickly clarifies.

“I know the saying, the ‘eyes are the windows to one’s soul’; but these windows are covered in soot and ashes – there’s nothing to see,” he remarks, brows furrowed once more, moving his head so he’s not directly facing the mocking mask yet keeping his gaze on the black dots.

“Even broken windows tell a story.”

“Can’t confirm.”

“Now, you just haven’t seen yourself in a mirror.”

“I have,” Techno rolls his eyes, and it’s said with more harshness than planned. Dream stays still, and he sighs. “I have.”

“What did you see?” 

A broken man.

A lost child.

A runaway prince, leaving his land to rot under the rule of his family’s killer.

A poor soul.

Just another outcast, devoted to an abandoned god, to the one thing that kept him alive.

“What’s left of me,” he mumbles, and it’s a lie. He doesn’t see what’s left of himself. He lost it somewhere in the sacrifices.

“And what you have now,” Dream begins, soft, “is it worthwhile?”

Techno can’t say for sure.

“Is that for me to decide?” he asks instead, tired.

“I’d think it is,” Dream nods. “But, if it matters, I think you are.”

“Am I what?”

“Worth it.”

“Worth what?” Techno inists, turning to him fully.

“A place.”

“Where.”

“Wherever you want,” Dream muses, inmovile. “On this Earth. On this ship.” There’s a short pause. “A dented sword can still save a life.”

“A dented sword can be the death of you in a battlefield,” he corrects.

“But this isn’t a battlefield, is it?” Dream tilts his head to the side.

Techno closes his eyes, breathing in the clear morning air.

No, it isn't.

“Although I guess some of us never do leave the ‘fields, huh,” Dream murmurs, quiet.

“I didn’t take you for another prisoner of war,” he croaks out, the sun warming his face. It’s warm enough now, but he chooses not to point that out to the man still snuggled to his side.

“Everyone on this ship is, in one way or another,” Dream hums, and there’s a small smile on his voice. “Some just shouldered less rocks to their windows, is all.”

“Did you shoulder an avalanche, Captain – is that why you’re the leader here?” Techno asks, half joking, with an empty chuckle. Dream’s shoulders shake with a soft laugh, and it sounds like wind chimes in the breeze. He decides he likes the sound. 

“I don’t know, actually,” Dream chirps, amused, shuffling to reach behind his head.

Technoblade watches as he takes off the mocking white mask, then looks up at him with a tired smile.

“What do you see?” Dream asks.

There’s silence as Techno looks into his eyes, unsure what to say.

He has freckles, he notes, and they almost hide the countless tiny scars scattered all over his face. He lifts a hand and ghosts his thumb over his cheek, as if to confirm they’re really there, that it’s not a trick of the light.

He doesn’t know what he sees.

Dream’s eyes look like the green stained glass of a church, abandoned after it burnt in a rebellion, the god it worshiped left in forgotten memories. They’re cracked windows, barely holding up together under their own weight, yet still keeping the inside safe from what’s out.

They’re beautiful. They catch the sun’s light in the thousands of cracks that run through them, shining the brightest he’s ever seen.

But he doesn’t know what’s behind them.

“I see green,” he whispers, thumb brushing under one of them. “Cracked, but not broken.”

Dream’s smile brightens. “That’s good.”

“Is it?”

“I couldn’t see them clearly, last I tried to check,” he admits, almost sheepish.

“You need to clean your mirror,” Techno quips, deadpan, and Dream laughs.

They feel the ship rock to the side, and watch as the sun moves across the horizon counter-clock wise.

“I guess Bad must’ve figured out we were off course,” Dream hums, a comment.

So they’re waking up down there. “Northwest,” Techno repeats, feeling the wind change directions with the ship. “Why?”

Dream shrugs with one shoulder, the other pressed to his side. “Not necessarily northwest, we’re just going as far away from southeast as possible ‘cause the mainland’s there.”

Northwest…

His family had a secret villa northwest of the mainland.

Techno wonders if it still stands, if anyone found it. Considering he’s the last one alive, there’s a chance it’s gone untouched all these years.

“Something northwest we should be aware of?” Dream asks, a brow quirked, reading his pensive expression.

“There’s a secret villa from the Empire’s previous royal line there, on an island,” he reveals, digging up memories of its location.

“The ones that died during the siege five years ago?” Dream sounds surprised, and he nods. “How- How do you know about it?”

“They left a single guard there to look after it,” he recalls, brows furrowing. If that man is still there, then he’s been alone in that place for five entire years. Techno feels very much guilty all of a sudden. “I can’t believe I forgot about him.”

There’s silence for a moment as he feels Dream’s eyes on him, connecting dots, remembering things he’s seen and heard but never paid much attention to.

The captain holds in a small gasp.

“Wait- Wait, you’re-”

Technoblade turns to look at him, and he wonders what the other sees. If he’s seen the memorials of him and his family, the paintings of a young boy who doesn’t look capable of the things he’s done to survive.

He feels as though nobody’s ever recognized him before, and he can’t exactly blame them.

He returns his eyes to the ocean, to a distant memory, of a then-young blond man of blue eyes and contagious laugh kneeling before his father as the important mission of utmost secrecy is given to him.

To keep one place safe, as the war swallows them whole.

“There’s safe haven northwest, Captain,” he comments, his voice heavy with something halfway between guilt and determination.

“Are we allowed there?” Dream asks, careful, worried.

“I have a duty to someone there, so I must go,” Techno mumbles. “And if someone like me can enter, then so can the rest of you.”

“Are you… sure?”

Technoblade turns at the sound of Dream’s voice, disbelieving and almost scared, and he finds the man staring at him with eyes wide with  _ hope _ .

He thinks of the two kids he accidentally saved during the chaos at port, of how they weren't scared, of how one of them held a knife ready to defend the other. He thinks of the rest of the ship's crew, and how they all walk carefully around the wood planks. How they make deliberate noise in their steps as they move, how they never walk up to someone directly from behind, how they never stand with their backs to the doors.

Techno wonders, then, if Dream’s ever known something other than long nights, too.

And if the others are all in similar situations.

"I might've failed you all terribly, but you're still my people," he manages out a smile. It's crooked and it's awkward, but it's what he remembers a smile to be. "I should be the one asking if you're sure."

Dream doesn't answer, and instead lunges in to capture him in a tight hug, hiding his face in his chest.

Technoblade blinks, surprised. 

Dream is warm. His chest is warm. Everywhere their bodies press is warm,  _ so warm _ .

He can feel the relief and the gratefulness as the man holds tight to his shirt at his back.

"You're right, we're your people," Dream mumbles into his chest, heavy with emotion. "Wherever you go, we'll follow."

Techno feels his heart ache, and he isn't exactly sure why. It's been a long while since he's felt it do much of anything, other than keep him alive.

So he wraps his arms around Dream and pulls him closer.

It's a wild breakfast, when the rest of the ship finds out he's the last survivor of the previous royal line. 

He finds out there's a few foreigners among them. The musician hails from Newfoundland, one of the kids is from the Gambojeistan archipelago while the other is from an illegal landing bay south of the ruins of Inquisition, and the man with the shades is from the Ursus union. Most of the crew, however, are Empire denizens, who seem overjoyed to know he survived.

Why, he wonders. Is it they miss his father's reign, when compared to the current one? Or has the new family treated them so poorly they look back at what they've done and wish it'd never happened?

They're all prisoners of war, he supposes.

And so is the man that welcomes them when they make landfall – with tears in his eyes and a gaze so exhausted it mirrors his own.

To see the ship's crew run around the overgrown villa as the lone guard laughs after them feels like home where he knows there shouldn't be. He knows his home was lost in the bloodbath that day five years ago.

But in the dead of the night he finds an abandoned shrine to the one god that answered his pleas and he asks,

can he not build a new one?

Can he build a new home, after all he's done? After barely escaping with his life from the one he used to have?

Is he allowed to be free, on this island, as a prisoner of war?

But then Dream asks him that exact same question, after a week of docking into the secret beach.

He finds him one night by the balconies and asks if the crew is allowed to make its home there, as they have nowhere else to go. If, even though it's not their villa and not all of them were strictly Empire loyalists when his family still ruled, they're allowed to seek refuge there.

To stay, help Sir Phil around the manor, tend to the fields, build some houses.

To be free, on this island, as prisoners of war.

How is he meant to say no to that? 

If he'd had doubts, they all wash away at the sight of the man's grateful smile.

"What about you?" he can't help but ask after a moment of silence, watching as he rubs warmth into his arms. Dream turns to him, mask discarded where he should've been asleep by then.

"Me?"

"Are you planning to stay?"

Dream looks down. "Are you?"

Techno turns to look down at the courtyard, at the small campfire where some of them are still huddled together with the guard, singing songs and telling stories.

It's been only a week, but they've already made it their home there.

It's not even their villa. It's not even part of some of their countries.

And they already built a new home.

So why can't he?

This is  _ supposed _ to be his home. These are  _ supposed  _ to be his people. 

What else does he need?

Permission?

_ From who? _ something somewhere in his consciousness chimes, and he remembers it from the bloodbath. It's the exact same question as it was back then, and thus the exact same answer.

He needs permission from no one.

Not to survive.

And not to live.

"Yeah," he mumbles. "I'm staying here."

Dream turns to look at him, the slightest bit surprised, and Techno holds his coat open for him. An invitation. 

"Will you follow?" 

Dream smiles, bright, and the moonlight shines in his eyes like raindrops caught in the cracks.

He steps up to his side and accepts the warmth, finding his free hand to hold.

"Wherever you go."

Techno smiles, a gesture he's been getting better at since they made landfall, and holds tight to his hand.

And the long night ends tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!


End file.
